Only Make Believe

“Her,” “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” and “Saving Mr. Banks.”

Joaquin Phoenix stars in a new movie directed by Spike Jonze.Credit Illustration by Owen Freeman

The hero of “Her” should be Him. Instead, he bears the name of Theodore Twombly, who sounds like the kind of nebbish that Preston Sturges used to dream up in his bath. Theodore is played by Joaquin Phoenix, complete with a tragicomic mustache and a selection of unwise shirts. Those are not his fault but the fashion of the day, like the high-waisted pants worn by all the men. Spike Jonze’s movie, which was shot in Los Angeles and Shanghai, is set in a near but dateless future, where the rough edges of existence have been rubbed away. The colors of clothes and furnishings, though citrus-bright, are diluted by the pastel softness of the lighting, so that nothing hurts the eye. People ride in smoothly humming trains, not belching cars. And Theodore’s cell phone reminds you of those slender vintage cases for cigarettes and visiting cards; if the ghost of Steve Jobs is watching, he will glow a covetous green.

This little flat box, plus an earpiece that Theodore plugs in whenever he wakes up or can’t sleep, is his portal. It links him to OS1, “the first artificially intelligent operating system,” which is newly installed on his computer. More than that, “it’s a consciousness,” with a voice of your choice, and a rapidly evolving personality, which grows not like a baby, or a library, but like an unstoppable alien spore. Theodore’s version is called Samantha, and practically her first request is: “You mind if I look through your hard drive?” She tidies his e-mails, reads a book in two-hundredths of a second, fixes him up on a date, and, when that goes badly, has sex with him—aural sex, so to speak, but Theodore will take what he can get. No surprise, really, given that the role of Samantha is spoken by Scarlett Johansson. Had Jonze picked the voice of Marge Simpson, say, the film would have turned out very differently.

As with all good science fiction, the plot is locked into the moral and physical landscape. That is why Theodore’s friends are unfazed by his other half. Paul (Chris Pratt) proposes a double date with his girlfriend, who chats to Samantha through the camera eye on Theodore’s phone, while for Amy (Amy Adams), who already works in video-gaming, and who has split from her dolt of a husband, the notion of computer-generated desire sounds ideal. The only dissenter is Catherine (Rooney Mara), who was married to Theodore. They are finalizing their divorce, and over lunch she mocks the solipsism of his new relationship. Mara is smart casting here; she more or less reprises her role from “The Social Network,” in which she called Mark Zuckerberg an asshole, and makes you wonder how far it is from Facebook to a world in which Theodore is the norm.

What makes “Her” so potent is that it does to us what Samantha does to Theodore. We are informed, cosseted, and entertained, and yet we are never more than a breath away from being creeped out. Just because someone browses your correspondence in a mood of flirtatious bonhomie doesn’t make her any less invasive; and just because you have invited her to do so doesn’t mean that you are in control. Who would have guessed, after a year of headlines about the N.S.A. and about the porousness of life online, that our worries on that score—not so much the political unease as a basic ontological fear that our inmost self is possibly up for grabs—would be best enshrined in a weird little romance by the man who made “Being John Malkovich” and “Where the Wild Things Are”? And it is romantic: Theodore and Samantha click together as twin souls, not caring that one soul is no more than a digital swarm. Sad, kooky, and daunting in equal measure, “Her” is the right film at the right time. It brings to full bloom what was only hinted at in the polite exchanges between the astronaut and HAL, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and, toward the end, as Samantha joins forces with like minds in cyberspace, it offers a seductive, nonviolent answer to Skynet, the system in the “Terminator” films that attacked its mortal masters. We are easy prey, not least when we fall in love. The human heart is where the tame things are.

After watching “Her,” why bother with “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”? The problem is not just that “Her” is a better film but that it’s a better Walter Mitty film—a more ambitious way of addressing the state of Mittyhood. When James Thurber published the original story in this magazine, in 1939, it lasted for two pages, and nothing happened; Mitty drove around town with his wife. His exploits—as a fighter ace, as a surgeon, and so on—stayed inside his head and refused to spring free. If his name has endured, it is because his plight is eternal. His ancestor was J. Alfred Prufrock, who talked of “sea-girls wreathed with seaweed” but never met any, which was probably a good thing, and his descendant is Theodore Twombly, who can lie alone and sweet-talk his beloved without having to risk a kiss.

All of which is tough on the new Walter Mitty, played by Ben Stiller. This Walter does have reveries, including the rescue of a three-legged dog from an exploding building, but they dwindle after half an hour, leaving Stiller—who directs as well as stars—to fill the time. The same dilemma greeted Danny Kaye when he took the role, in 1947. Having exhausted his heroic imagination, Walter swelled into an actual hero for the rest of the movie, and the same applies here, as he jets to Greenland and Afghanistan, leaps from helicopters, and tussles with sharks. So much for Mitty the non-achiever. At least Kaye was up against a decent villain: Boris Karloff, no less, whose opening line was “I know of a way to kill a man and leave no trace.” Stiller’s manly task is—wait for it—to find an errant photographer (Sean Penn) who doesn’t have a cell phone. I thought I would faint from excitement.

The result may be the oddest film of the season. It boasts an array of sublime backdrops and a yearning score, but the climate of feeling is anxious and inward, encapsulated in Stiller’s darting gaze, and the movie itself keeps glancing backward, at the lost and the obsolete. Walter works at Life, which is closing down and preparing its farewell issue. His grail, as he hops the globe, is a single negative from a strip of 35-mm. film. This air of elegy infects the story and sucks the fun out of it. It kills a beautiful idea and leaves no trace.

There are two stories in “Saving Mr. Banks.” The first begins in 1961, at the end of a twenty-year campaign by Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) to bring “Mary Poppins” to the screen. Hitherto, the author, P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson), has stated that she will not be moved, lest Mary and her other creations be traduced, or stretched into what she calls “silly cartoons.” Now, however, in need of money, she flies to Los Angeles, there to be wooed into signing. In short, this is not a film about a film but a film about winning the rights to a book. In fifty years’ time, will audiences thrill to “J. K. Rowling and the Contractual Clause of Fire”?

The other story, of which we see frequent clips in our heroine’s memory, unfolds in Australia, in 1906, where the young Travers—whose actual name was Helen Goff—moves with her family to a farmhouse. She has a harassed mother (Ruth Wilson) and an alcoholic father (Colin Farrell), who works in a bank, and whom, despite everything, she adores. His first name is Travers, which explains a lot. Indeed, the entire movie is less of a drama and more of a prolonged explanation, lightly therapeutic and Poppins-neat. The cause of Travers’s long-concealed distress, and its blithe effect on her fiction and on Disney’s eventual film, are clipped together as crisply as a hook and eye. “Saving Mr. Banks” is itself a Disney product, and you have to admire its nerveless promotional chutzpah—the way in which the narrative arc bends upward after Travers has been whisked to Disneyland, and the tender (though invented) visit that Walt pays to her London home. It is the case that she was upset at the première of “Mary Poppins,” though the tears that we see were not an outpouring of catharsis, as the new film suggests, but a burst of exasperation.

And yet “Saving Mr. Banks” does the trick. We have to endure Colin Farrell, who looks uncomfortable, sounds un-Australian, and even makes an unconvincing drunk. On the other hand, there’s a kick and a lilt to the scenes in which Travers, ears pricked for solecism, listens to the Sherman brothers (B. J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman) as they canter through their songs. The director is John Lee Hancock, who does what he did with “The Blind Side,” where he commandeered a true and jagged tale, tidied up the trauma, and made sure that everyone lived sappily ever after. Sandra Bullock carried the day then, and now Emma Thompson repeats the process. “Sun came out to say hello to you!” Travers’s driver (Paul Giamatti) says, as she arrives in Los Angeles. “Don’t be preposterous,” she replies, and the movie is revived by that testiness and wit—the same qualities that rang through the fantastical briskness of the Poppins novels. Just as Mary rescued the wilting Banks family, so Thompson saves the film. A spoonful of her medicine makes the sugar go down. ♦